Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Alfred Hitchcock on Hollywood

"A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it."
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"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
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"In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director."
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"Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up everytime."
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"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."
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"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it."
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"Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms."
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"Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare."
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"Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders."
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"I don't understand why we have to experiment with film. I think everything should be done on paper. A musician has to do it, a composer. He puts a lot of dots down and beautiful music comes out. And I think that students should be taught to visualize. That's the one thing missing in all this. The one thing that the student has got to do is to learn that there is a rectangle up there - a white rectangle in a theater - and it has to be filled."

3 comments:

Visual Velocity said...

Great quotes. I collect quotes from actors/directors in magazines. Hitchcock quotes have always been one of my favorites. Details magazine once compiled Hitchcock quotes. The one I found most striking is: “I find it delightful that the stars have been placed on the Hollywood sidewalks so we can walk all over them.”

rex baylon said...

Hi Andy,

Thank you so much for visiting my blog. Hitchcock did have a wonderful way with words. Two of my favorite quotes are: "Man does not live by murder alone. He needs affection, approval, encouragement and, occasionally, a hearty meal." And the other one went: "Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house."

jayclops said...

"The cinema is not a slice of life, it's a piece of cake."

Here's my contribution, hehe. The quote opens my long-abandoned film blog, hehe.